There May Actually Be a Good Reason to Teach Drones to Land on Cars

DLR

Last week, researchers at the German Aerospace Center (DLR) pushed drone technology another step further: They made one land on a moving car. On a runway at the Mindelheim-Mattsies airfield in Bavaria, the 44-pound drone successfully spotted a QR code on the roof of an Audi and touched down on the net affixed to the station wagon’s roof, at 43 mph.

This demo inspires two thoughts, in quick succession. 1) Cool! 2) Wait, what’s the point of this?

The DLR researchers say using a speed-matching vehicle to catch a drone makes for safer landings, and that the removal of cumbersome landing gear frees up space for the UAV to carry more equipment. “The available payload capacity can be increased significantly. In the case of very light solar aircraft it could be almost doubled,” says Tin Muskardin, an engineer at the DLR’s Institute of Robotics and Mechatronics who worked on the project. It’s good for high altitude, long endurance (HALE) drones, he says, because “these fragile aircraft could be landed in much less restrictive weather conditions.”

In other words, a drone without wheels and the accompanying support structures could accommodate more scientific instruments for errands like taking weather measurements up in the stratosphere, and it wouldn’t have to worry as much about dangerous crosswinds interfering with touchdown. And if a strong wind did push the drone off course, the moving vehicle underneath could reposition accordingly (as long as the road’s wide enough).

That seems handy enough, but it’s not clear the researchers have found an answer to a question anyone is asking. “There may be places where people don’t have the ability to land and they need to catch a drone,” says Colin Snow, CEO and founder of the research firm Drone Analyst. The US military has experimented with that, he says, but is moving away from the idea. “I scratched my head a little bit when I saw it, honestly, and said, ‘Okay that’s nice.'”

If your aim is to reduce the drone’s weight (and thus increase its carrying capacity), Snow concedes cutting out the landing gear is a smart move. But he points out that there are already drones available, like the Trimble UX5 and SenseFly eBee, that have scrapped their wheels in favor of more durable structures that let them land on rough terrain. AeroVironment’s Raven, for example, is a hand-launched vehicle without landing gear—it’s built for use in Afghanistan, and just lands in the dirt. “That problem has already been tackled just by having beefier underbellies,” Snow says. “And that beefier underbelly has tricked down to advanced commercial small drones.”

All of which is to say, now is not the time to invest your savings in a company that specializes in making landing nets you strap to the roof of your car. That’s not to say, however, that there’s no point to figuring out how to make an aircraft land itself on a moving target. For one thing, remember, it’s really cool.

More seriously, there may be a bigger upside for another project interested in stratospheric flight research. The EU-funded Gabriel Project Consortium is working to make air travel more efficient by using a magnetic levitation pad to assist with take off and landing. Instead of carrying heavy landing gear that’s only useful for a few minutes per flight, planes would attach to a sled that levitates above the runway. It’s the sled that accelerates down the track, and unleashes the plane once it’s going fast enough to lift off the ground, not unlike how jets take off from aircraft carriers.

As a plane comes in to land, the sled moves down the runway, matching the speed of the descending aircraft, until they link up on the ground. Like with the DLR landing demo, the first reaction to hearing about this is, Cool! But here, the follow-up isn’t, “Why do this?” It’s “Why does anyone think rebuilding all the world’s airports is the best way to make flying a bit more efficient?”

Let’s go back to drones, then. Snow doesn’t buy the idea that reworking landings is the best way to keep UAVs in the air. “Solar power, solar augmentation, those are the places where people are looking right now for some big wins for endurance,” he says. “How much endurance would taking off a landing gear add to a drone? Not much. I don’t know what other problem they’re trying to solve, honestly.”

Still, the fact that this technology doesn’t have an obvious use right now doesn’t mean it’s no good. It’s not hard to imagine Amazon tinkering with it to make its package-delivering drones link up with its package-delivering trucks. Or maybe some brilliant fast food entrepreneur will build a fleet of drones to bring us meals at highway speeds. Forget drive-through eating—it’s time for drive-by.

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